Yes, this can absolutely be an annoyance, and I fully agree with you in that it can take a lot of physical movement to reach from one side of a screen to the other in order to hit, for example, the File menu in OSX. I've run into this on several jobs. But you're conflating annoyance in certain configurations with the overall usefulness of an interface.

It all depends on how you tend to arrange your windows on screen, what pointing device you use, what programs you use and how they utilize individual windows and whether those draw menus using Apple's API or not, etc. The benefit of having an infinite vertical target to play with when hitting that stationary menu has been shown to trump the effort it takes to reach that area. Whether or not your particular setup produces a situation of frequent laborious (not sarcastically used) trips to the menu bar has nothing to do with whether or not it's a good idea to build a general computing UI that way. Having the option to include multiple instances of the menu bar on multiple screens would be ugly as hell, but still faster than bar-per-window.

Dual 30"ers? Awesome? Yeah. Necessary for lots of people? Absolutely. But you're nowhere near the total desktop aspect ratio of the vast majority of users.

I believe you're running into a "feature" that's causing some confusion. If you manually change a document's open with application it segregates itself from the pool of documents that change when you hit "change all" on other documents. In case it's 12:30 and I'm not making sense I'll give an example...

You have a.tif, b.tif, and c.tif. The default program for opening.tif files is Preview and all three files in question are opening with the default. You change a.tif to open with Photoshop. You then change b.tif to open with Firefox and hit the "change all" button. You'd then be left with b and c.tif opening in Firefox, and a.tif opening in Photoshop because you changed it manually from the default. At some point in the future hitting change all on a.tif will both return it to the default pool along with b and c and change the default.tif program to whatever a.tif is set to at that moment.

I think for one reason or another these avi files think they're all out of the pool. You can change the files already on your drive to use the default quickly by using the Find command to find all files ending in.avi on the computer, then hitting select all and then command-option-i to bring up the inspector. Then change them to open with the program of your choice and hit change all.

Hope this helps, works, makes sense, and wasn't too wordy (I don't know how well you know your way around the MacOS so I explained a bit more than usual).

I don't want to be trollish or a dick or anything...but that doesn't make any sense. Grand Central Dispatch's purpose is to provide a unified and efficient way to write multithreaded programs for OSX. I'm not sure why they would develop that for Windows. That's more of Microsoft's core OS division's job, not Apple's.

Most notably I use their email service, I'll use my Wave account if and when it becomes particularly useful, and I just might use their DNS server because I am pretty tired of my ISP's slow responses. So if they decided to at some point they could do some serious damage to my privacy.

But up to this point they've only provided services that I find useful and generally superior to other free alternatives and have only asked for statistics and a reasonable amount of screen real estate for ads. I'm definitely not one to trust a company with too much information, but so far that's perfectly acceptable to me.

If someone can give me a good, currently applicable, practical reason to, though, I'll avoid their DNS like the plague.

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @06:07PM
from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."

Plus, you know, we're talking about tools. I don't care if Sears lets me buy molds so that I can forge my own hammer and bolt on my own handmade handle. If one of SnapOn's models has a sweet Hello Kitty handle that suits my needs I'll buy it from SnapOn even though they ultimately give me less choice in the matter.

Same with Apple. They may not let you choose your case or main board or the make of your ram, but they give you a box that works at a fair price (by OEM standards).

And I doubt they'll ever totally dominate the computer market, pushing out all competition and forging a one configuration world where we all pay $1499.99 for their Mac XIIs, so-named because it's the twelfth model to come out since the Great Amalgamation. It's not Wrong to be closed, just different.

Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday October 25, 2009 @08:58PM
from the three-card-monty-design dept.

AT&T customers (iPhone users notably among them) have seen some wireless congestion in recent months; Brough Turner thinks the trouble might be self-inflicted. According to Turner, the poor throughput and connection errors can be chalked up to "configuration errors specifically, congestion collapse induced by misconfigured buffers in their mobile core network." His explanation makes an interesting read.

You know. I, for one, really like the ability of these people who actually cast the votes to not follow what the votes as reported by the people in charge of the election. You know, cause sometimes not being legally tied to the results of things like...voting machines could be a good thing? You know?

(This is what gave people the bad impression, but what's the alternative? If Microsoft game installers a pass, like Apple does, they would have been crucified for insecurity.)

Well, that's not really true. Any time an app in OSX is altered it throws up a warning on the next launch, and any time you install or update something it requires an admin pass (unless it's an update of a drag and drop install that didn't require a pass in the first place).